by Brian Lumley
For a few moments more Khasathut listened to the dying man, before lifting his arm to point toward the plateau’s rim. Two members of the Black Guard lifted Harsin Ben up and ran to throw him, guts fluttering like rags behind him as he flew, over the plateau’s rim into empty space. . . .
To fill the utter silence which followed, a chill wind blew up that keened across the plateau and made a twisting sand devil in front of Pharaoh’s throne. Then Khai’s sobbing sounded on the quivering air and the spell was broken.
Slowly Khasathut’s masked head turned in Khai’s direction. The boy was slumped between a pair of blacks, exhausted by his terrific struggling. His blond hair was plastered to his forehead and dripped perspiration; his white shirt and kilt were drenched and adhered to his body like wet rags.
“Anulep,” said Pharaoh, his voice completely void of emotion. “Take the boy into the pyramid. Do whatever is necessary to prepare him for training, which is to commence as soon as practicable. You will be personally responsible for his training, and eventually he will relieve you of certain of your duties—which I have long considered to be excessive. You have three months. . . .”
For answer, the Vizier bowed his head. He beckoned to the guardsmen holding Khai and they followed him as he entered the loftier chambers of the pyramid through an arched entrance of carved stone to disappear into stark black shadow. Stumbling dazedly between the blacks, Khai turned his head once as he was half-carried under the archway. Staring back through eyes which were glazed dull with shock, he looked one last time upon a scene which burned his mind like drops of acid:
The naked, butchered carcasses of his mother and sister where they sat like gargoyles—no longer human beings but slaughtered animals—overlooking Asorbes through sightless eyes, transfixed and supported by crimson-tipped spines of bronze. . . .
VIII
INSIDE THE PYRAMID
Unlike the tombs and monuments of a later age, Khasathut’s pyramid was not an almost solid mountain of stone, but a multi-storied maze of shafts, corridors and chambers whose total internal capacity was perhaps as great as two percent of the whole. That is to say that for every fifty cubic feet of solid stone, there was perhaps one of air or living-space. There were also sophisticated air-conditioning systems, with inlets and outlets through panels of perforated stone in the pyramid’s outer skin, and a catchment system which provided the massive monument with its water.
Moreover, incorporated into the structure was a series of smooth-lined, near-vertical shafts which were designed to channel sand from the topmost quarter of the pyramid to its basement temples and living areas, including Pharaoh’s subterranean tomb and the quarters of his entire Black Guard. When Khasathut was ready for his interment, his guardsmen would accompany him into darkness—entombed alive behind thousands of tons of sand.
Khai knew the layout of many of these rooms, passages, slipways and watercourses well; indeed, he had always been interested in his father’s work and during the last seven or eight years had often clambered with him in and about the pyramid’s levels as each was completed in its turn. His interest had extended to Harsin Ben’s drawings and plans, so that he understood a great deal of the principles underlying the pyramid’s construction; and as his stumbling feet moved him forward between the huge blacks—and despite the fact that he was close to exhaustion and closer to madness—still he recognized the ways he walked and knew that he was quickly descending into bowels of rock. The way was lighted by steadily burning flambeaux, causing shadows to leap on walls of stone, and as the party approached these blazing sources of light, Anulep’s shadow crept along the walls until it fell upon Khai. Each time this happened, it caused a chill inside the boy which was at once dreadful and preternatural.
As they went, so the Vizier began to talk to Khai, his voice sepulchral as it echoed back from where he strode on ahead. “One learns fast in the pyramid, boy, or else one is lost. Your father built the pyramid, and so I expect you will learn all the faster. You will learn the pyramid’s ways; its known, well-trodden ways, yes, and its secret ways, too . . . and its laws. Above all else, you will learn obedience to me, and through me obedience to Pharaoh.
“Pharaoh’s life draws quickly to an end, moves ever closer to that final day when he will draw his last breath—at least until the return of his ancestors from the stars. Age will not have brought him down, even though he is older than most men. No, for while his body ages, his lusts and passions seem to grow greater. Ah!—and did you think that Pharaoh was beyond passion and lust? As he is greater than men, so his needs are more . . . demanding. Certain of your future duties will be concerned with Pharaoh’s needs—closely concerned.”
So Anulep’s voice went on and on, echoing through the bowels of the pyramid and becoming almost hypnotic in its monotony. Against all natural laws, Khai was drawn back from the abyss by that voice, saved from what might otherwise have become a permanent withdrawal from a world grown far too monstrous for him. Much of what he was told escaped his understanding, but at least the Vizier’s voice was a focal point, something to hang onto as his mind clawed its way back from the chasm of horror which threatened to engulf it.
In what seemed to Khai a very short time, they had descended to the more frequently used and inhabited levels of the pyramid—those which were closer to ground level, where cavernous temples and great halls loomed on every side and slaves, strangely-crowned priests and acolytes came and went in eerie silence by the light of oil- and resin-burning flambeaux—but Anulep and his party barely paused before plunging deeper still. Khai had time enough to glimpse huge golden idols and figures carved from white limestone, massive statues of gods with the bodies of men and the heads of birds and animals, huge basins of burning oil which illuminated grottoes of untold mystery, and the blackened mouths of vast flues where they opened high in darkly domed ceilings, before he was carried down into the nethermost vaults beneath.
Here in the very bowels of the earth, the air-conditioning was less effective—either that or the odors of the place were more difficult to dispel—and Khai’s nose involuntarily wrinkled as certain particularly offensive smells were wafted to him. The light was much more subdued here and the shadows so much darker; and now there were strange sounds and furtive-seeming movements suggestive of esoteric industry. Approaching the entrance to a huge room where the light was somewhat brighter, Anulep bade the Nubian guardsmen wait outside and took Khai from them to lead him into the chamber. They paused just within the threshold where the high priest cautioned: “Wait! We can see all we need to see from here.”
There, engaged in various alchemical activities about sunken stone vats whose contents bubbled and seethed with unpleasant sucking sounds, seven darkly-robed figures worked to the slow pace of their own low chanting, only pausing when they sensed the presence of Anulep and the boy. Seven pairs of eyes turned to stare luminously in the flickering gloom, until Anulep pulled on Khai’s arm and drew him out of the chamber.
“We must not disturb them, boy,” the high priest said, “for they are about Pharaoh’s work, as they have been about it for more than twenty years. They are the Dark Heptad—the seven most powerful necromancers and wizards in all Khem and the lands around, and they seek that earthly immortality in which Pharaoh would clothe his eternal ka. If they fail him . . . then he must wait on the return of his ancestors from the stars. But if they succeed—ah!—then Pharaoh will live forever!
“I repeat: it is not age that ails him, boy, though indeed he waxes very old. No, it is the poisons within him. The poisons of his own blood, and of the Nile’s blood, which is in him as it was in his earthly forebears. The great gods that came when the tribes were ignorant hoped to strengthen their blood by mixing it with the raw blood of men, but they were not successful. Khasathut is the last of his line. His seed is plentiful, indeed copious, but it does not take root. There will be no more Pharaohs with the blood of gods in them. Not until the second coming.
“That is another reason why
Khasathut seeks immortality; so that ordinary men shall never occupy the great throne of Khem. And so the Dark Seven work for him as he desires, and as you shall see, they have had their successes . . . of a sort. Come—”
Now they passed along a rock-cut corridor to a room guarded by a gate of massive bronze bars. Anulep produced a key and turned it in the lock, then threw the gate open. While the two guards waited outside, showing an agitation and a fear which Khai noted even through his aching numbness of mind, Anulep led his charge into the dark chamber beyond the gate. As if their movements had stirred up something rotten, gusts of an evil fetor seemed to rise up stiflingly from the floor, so that Khai pinched his nostrils.
The place was lighted by a handful of tiny lamps placed at intervals along its length, and as Khai moved slowly over crumbling debris, his eyes grew more accustomed to the gloom. And suddenly he understood the stench of the place as he recognized it for what it was: a mortuary! The feet of corpses by the dozen stuck out from niches in the walls, and cadavers in various stages of disintegration lay in piles everywhere. Now Anulep took up one of the tiny lamps and held it close to a mound of bodies.
“Dead, eh, boy? Dead and falling into decay, returning to dust. Ah, but they have known the touch of the Dark Seven! They are not incorruptible, no—but neither are they wholly dead—not yet. Look!” And from a pocket he took a tiny golden whistle which he put to his lips. He blew a single note, an eerie, undulating note . . . and at once the air was full of a leathery creaking, the suffocating stink of death—and motion!
“Come!” the Vizier’s voice fell to a whispering quaver as he hurried Khai back along the way they had come. “We cannot stay here now. These are the slaves of Nyarlathotep—whose very essence the Dark Seven invoked to perform their black magic, defying even Anubis himself—and as such, they are dangerous. See how they awaken?”
Outside in the corridor the high priest quickly locked the gate, and beyond its heavy bars gaunt and leathery figures began to stumble and flail about in the darkness while their stench welled out in ever-thickening clouds. Half-rotten fingers tore at the bars and fleshless skulls grinned and bobbed.
“I could make them dance for you if I so desired,” the Vizier said, once more in control of himself, “but theirs is not dancing for eyes such as yours. It amuses the Pharaoh, of course, but he is not as other men. No, and this is not the kind of immortality he sought.”
Even as he spoke, from somewhere up above there came the boom of a great gong. Looking up, Anulep remarked: “The afternoon is already one-third fled. Well, I have my duties, Khai Ibizin, and so we must hurry.” He blew one more warbling note on his whistle and the stumbling things behind the bars instantly crumpled into their previous immobility.
Again Anulep took Khai’s shrinking hand. “I have one more thing to show you,” he continued. “A hiding place, a peephole, from which you shall soon gaze out upon rare and wonderful things—marvelous things, your very future—and then I will take you to your room.” He held the boy’s hand in his own bony claw and lowered his face to smile a ghastly, toothless smile; and Khai could not help but notice again the small, circular gape of his mouth.
“Ah?” the Vizier opened his eyes wide. “Don’t you like my little empty mouth, then? A pity, for you yourself must visit the dentist in just a day or two.” He nodded his skull of a head. “You will see why . . . tomorrow night. But now, can you walk? Or must the guardsmen drag you? Ah, the resilience of the young! I see you can walk. Come then, and hurry, hurry. . . .”
part
FOUR
I
THE NUPTIAL CHAMBER
It was now some thirty hours since Khai last saw Anulep. Thirty hours spent alone in his room three or four stories above the temples and living areas of the ground level, hanging onto his sanity as best he might while his mind turned over and over again those monstrous events which had so utterly destroyed his world. But the hideous pictures were no longer clear in the eye of his memory—they had become strangely and mercifully blurred—and the more he tried to concentrate on them the more indistinct they became. The mind soon forgets or obscures that which it cannot bear to contemplate. Anulep’s instructions, on the other hand—those monotonously delivered, almost hypnotic orders he had given Khai before leaving him in his dimly-lighted cell of a room—had remained crystal clear. Khai’s mind had been bruised, even wounded, but not irreparably crippled.
As for his physical condition: since his ordeal on the pyramid’s east face, he had taken no food and had managed to snatch only a little sleep—catnaps from which he was invariably driven back to the waking world by shrieking nightmares—so that he was steadily growing weaker. It was not that he had been deprived of food, on the contrary, for slaves had brought food to him on three separate occasions . . . only to be sent away by one whose appetite seemed to have died within him. He was, however, a boy on the verge of manhood, with youth’s almost boundless energy, and it would be a long time before privation completely incapacitated him.
So he waited for the appointed hour and the reverberating tones of a gong struck five times; and when at last that gong sounded, signifying the approach of the midnight hour, he almost automatically took up his small lamp, slipped from his room and made his way through deserted, cramped and cobwebby corridors of rock toward the secret place where Anulep had told him to conceal himself. Not once had it crossed Khai’s mind to run away; as of yet he was simply too stunned to contemplate or even imagine doing anything of his own volition. He knew only that he must do as he was bidden or suffer the Pharaoh’s wrath, and that the living god’s wrath was terrible indeed!
This was just about the sum total of Khai’s knowledge concerning Pharaoh, but on the other hand, his knowledge of the pyramid was not at all inconsiderable. No one but his father, so cruelly murdered, had been better informed on the subject of the pyramid’s internal construction. No one, that is, except for the pyramid’s dwellers, and even they had not gone where their duties did not require their presence. Thus, even in Khai’s dazed condition and assisted by so feeble a light as that of his little stone lamp, still he was able to make his way swiftly and surely to the secret place.
Soon enough he found himself peering down into that crevice shown to him by Anulep, from which vantage point he was to watch the chosen maidens become brides of the Pharaoh. Anulep had told him that during the ceremony he must pay particular attention to those duties of the high priest which he himself would soon be called upon to perform; duties of a secret, personal and intimate nature in the service of the Pharaoh himself.
Despite his torpor of mental exhaustion, Khai found himself wondering just what these intimate duties might be, when it was common knowledge that no man’s hand might ever fall upon the Pharaoh’s person or even touch him. For the Pharaoh was a god, strange and cold by mortal—no, by any—standards, and divorced from the mundane ways of men. His ways must be strange indeed, thought Khai; and yet Anulep’s duties, whatever they were, were soon to be transferred upon him? It was all so very hard to understand. . . .
Still and all, the high priest had told him that Khasathut found him pleasing in his sight, and perhaps taking Khai into his service was the God-king’s way of balancing matters. Since he had been instrumental in the destruction of Khai’s family, perhaps it was now his intention to atone by drawing the boy to his own bosom. But what, Khai wondered, was to become of Anulep when finally the time came for him to hand over his duties?
With thoughts such as these crowding each other in his shrinking and fearful mind, the boy lowered himself into the hole until his feet touched bottom. Straightening up, his head came just level with the floor of the passage above. He blew out his lamp where its flame now flickered before his face, then crouched down and searched for the peephole that Anulep had mentioned. And sure enough the peephole was there: an uncemented horizontal slot three inches long and a quarter-inch wide, giving Khai an almost completely unobstructed view of the chamber behind the limestone wall.
At this particular spot, the wall was at its thinnest, built of soft-grained slabs as opposed to massive blocks, so that Khai’s angle of vision was a wide one. Now he forced himself to concentrate, giving his undivided attention to whatever was about to occur in the bridal chamber. First, however, he would acquaint himself with the chamber itself, a room of which he had no previous knowledge.
It was essentially bare, that room, containing only one or two items of furniture. The principal piece was a golden throne of small-seeming dimensions, with two tiny steps in front. A single lamp, standing on a slender pedestal in the center of the room, lighted the high-ceilinged, hexagonal chamber with a dully flickering glow that caused the throne to gleam and coruscate from the many precious stones set in its arms and headrest. The light from the lamp also reached the walls, highlighting their bas-reliefs with lines of black shadow that moved flowingly with the continual flickering of the flame.
These bas-reliefs immediately caught and held Khai’s attention, for they were especially erotic in nature and showed coition between naked men and women and all manner of birds and beasts. Moving with the action of the lamp-cast shadows, the figures seemed so full of lustful life that Khai soon became aroused by the sight. Finally, fighting his excitement, he forced himself to look away.
His eyes found the dark mouths of twin passages where they entered like huge nostrils into the bridal chamber through the wall directly opposite his vantage point. Between these tunnels, the buttress of the inner wall supported a bracketed, unlighted torch. Peering round the room, Khai noted that similar flambeaux were set in the other walls, including, it seemed likely, the wall through which he even now gazed. If these torches were to be lighted, Khai would have to be careful that his eyes were not seen shining through the peephole.
